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Iran's Sex Slaves Suffer Hideously Under Mullahs Posted June 8, 2004By Donna M. Hughes
A measure of Islamic fundamentalists' success in controlling society is the depth and totality with which they suppress the freedom and rights of women. In Iran for 25 years, the ruling mullahs have enforced humiliating and sadistic rules and punishments on women and girls, enslaving them in a gender apartheid system of segregation, forced veiling, second-class status, lashing and stoning to death.

Joining a global trend, the fundamentalists have added another way to dehumanize women and girls: buying and selling them for prostitution. Exact numbers of victims are impossible to obtain, but according to an official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the number of teen-age girls in prostitution. The magnitude of this statistic conveys how rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran, there are an estimated 84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of them are on the streets, others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly operate in the city. The trade is also international: Thousands of Iranian women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery abroad.

The head of Iran's Interpol bureau believes that the sex-slave trade is one of the most profitable activities in Iran today. This criminal trade is not conducted outside the knowledge and participation of the ruling fundamentalists. Government officials themselves are involved in buying, selling and sexually abusing women and girls.

Many of the girls come from impoverished rural areas. Drug addiction is epidemic throughout Iran, and some addicted parents sell their children to support their habits. High unemployment -- 28 percent for youth 15 to 29 years of age, and 43 percent for women 15 to 20 years of age -- is a serious factor in driving restless youth to accept risky offers for work. Slave traders take advantage of any opportunity in which women and children are vulnerable. For example, following the recent earthquake in Bam, orphaned girls have been kidnapped and taken to a known slave market in Tehran where Iranian and foreign traders meet.

Popular destinations for victims of the slave trade are the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. According to the head of the Tehran province judiciary, traffickers target girls between 13 and 17, although there are reports of some girls as young as 8 and 10, to send to Arab countries. One ring was discovered after an 18-year-old girl escaped from a basement where a group of girls were held before being sent to Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The number of Iranian women and girls who are deported from Persian Gulf countries indicates the magnitude of the trade. Upon their return to Iran, the Islamic fundamentalists blame the victims, and often physically punish and imprison them. The women are examined to determine if they have engaged in "immoral activity." Based on the findings, officials can ban them from leaving the country again.

Police have uncovered a number of prostitution and slavery rings operating from Tehran that have sold girls to France, Britain and Turkey as well. One network based in Turkey bought smuggled Iranian women and girls, gave them fake passports, and transported them to European and Persian Gulf countries. In one case, a 16-year-old girl was smuggled to Turkey, and then sold to a 58-year-old European national for $20,000.

In the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, local police report that girls are being sold to Pakistani men as sex slaves. The Pakistani men marry the girls, ranging in age from 12 to 20, and then sell them to brothels called "Kharabat" in Pakistan. One network was caught contacting poor families around Mashad and offering to marry girls. The girls were then taken through Afghanistan to Pakistan where they were sold to brothels.

In the southeastern border province of Sistan Baluchestan, thousands of Iranian girls reportedly have been sold to Afghan men. Their final destinations are unknown.

One factor contributing to the increase in prostitution and the sex-slave trade is the number of teen girls who are running away from home. The girls are rebelling against fundamentalist-imposed restrictions on their freedom, domestic abuse and parental drug addictions. Unfortunately, in their flight to freedom, the girls find more abuse and exploitation. Ninety percent of girls who run away from home will end up in prostitution. As a result of runaways, in Tehran alone there are an estimated 25,000 street children, most of them girls. Pimps prey upon street children, runaways and vulnerable high-school girls in city parks. In one case, a woman was discovered selling Iranian girls to men in Persian Gulf countries; for four years, she had hunted down runaway girls and sold them. She even sold her own daughter for $11,000.

Given the totalitarian rule in Iran, most organized activities are known to the authorities. The exposure of sex-slave networks in Iran has shown that many mullahs and officials are involved in the sexual exploitation and trade of women and girls. Women report that in order to have a judge approve a divorce they have to have sex with him. Women who are arrested for prostitution say they must have sex with the arresting officer. There are reports of police locating young women for sex for the wealthy and powerful mullahs.

In cities, shelters have been set up to provide assistance for runaways. Officials who run these shelters are often corrupt; they run prostitution rings using the girls from the shelter. For example in Karaj, the former head of a Revolutionary Tribunal and seven other senior officials were arrested in connection with a prostitution ring that used 12- to 18-year-old girls from a shelter called the Center of Islamic Orientation.

Other instances of corruption abound. There was a judge in Karaj who was involved in a network that identified young girls to be sold abroad. And in Qom, the center for religious training in Iran, when a prostitution ring was broken up, some of the people arrested were from government agencies, including the Department of Justice.

The ruling fundamentalists have differing opinions on their official position on the sex trade: deny and hide it or recognize and accommodate it. In 2002, a BBC journalist was deported for taking photographs of prostitutes. Officials told her: "We are deporting you ... because you have taken pictures of prostitutes. This is not a true reflection of life in our Islamic Republic. We don't have prostitutes." Yet, earlier the same year, officials of the Social Department of the Interior Ministry suggested legalizing prostitution as a way to manage it and control the spread of HIV. They proposed setting up brothels, called "morality houses," and using the traditional religious custom of temporary marriage, in which a couple can marry for a short period of time, even an hour, to facilitate prostitution. Islamic fundamentalists' ideology and practices are adaptable when it comes to controlling and using women.

Some may think a thriving sex trade in a theocracy with clerics acting as pimps is a contradiction in a country founded and ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. In fact, this is not a contradiction. First, exploitation and repression of women are closely associated. Both exist where women, individually or collectively, are denied freedom and rights. Second, the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran are not simply conservative Muslims. Islamic fundamentalism is a political movement with a political ideology that considers women inherently inferior in intellectual and moral capacity. Fundamentalists hate women's minds and bodies. Selling women and girls for prostitution is just the dehumanizing complement to forcing women and girls to cover their bodies and hair with the veil.

In a religious dictatorship like Iran, one cannot appeal to the rule of law for justice for women and girls. Women and girls have no guarantees of freedom and rights, and no expectation of respect or dignity from the Islamic fundamentalists. Only the end of the Iranian regime will free women and girls from all the forms of slavery they suffer.
Dr. Donna M. Hughes is a professor and holds the Carlson Endowed Chair in Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She wishes to acknowledge the Iranian human-rights and pro-democracy activists who contributed information for this article. If readers have information on prostitution and the sex-slave trade in Iran, contact Hughes at dhughes@uri.edu. Read more at: www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/.

This woman recently was guest at an Italian talk show and she has spoken about this tragedy while an imam was listening and,when asked what he thinks about it ,he said: "that's wrong, but she also committed a big mistake"
as you see in the photo below,she wears a mask when she goes out

We Are All Souad

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 9, 2004

I suddenly felt a cold liquid running over my head and instantly I was on fire. . .I start to run in the garden, barefoot. I slap my hair, I scream. . . .I smell the gasoline and I run, the hem of my long dress getting in the way. My terror leads me instinctively away from the courtyard. I run toward the garden as the only way out. . .How did I get away? Did he run after me? Was he waiting for me to fall so he could watch me go up in flames? [1]

These are the chilling words of a Palestinian woman recalling her attempted “honor” killing in her remote West Bank village twenty five years ago. She calls herself “Souad” and she tells us her frightening personal story in her new memoir, Burned Alive: A Victim of the Law of Men. It is the first account of the practice of honor killings given by a survivor.

Killing women for “honor” is just one of the myriad regressive and violent pathologies inherent in Arab tribal culture, where institutionalized misogyny and sexual repression intersect to spawn yearnings for violence, terror, death and suicide.

The prerequisite for being a victim of an “honor” killing in the Arab Middle East is that you need only be a female. And you don’t have to engage in consensual sex before marriage to get your death sentence. That you die for this is a given. But you could also be punished by death for being raped or for people saying you were raped. In many cases, you also need only to look in the eyes of a male or be seen talking to one -- or to have someone say that you talked to one. Then you are a charmuta – a whore. And you must die because your blood is the only substance that can wash your family’s – and community’s -- shame away.

And there will be no lawyer, no hearing, no defense for you. The male with whom you associated -- in the real or imagined world -- will always be exonerated, no matter what. And the family member who kills or maims you will never be punished. To the contrary, he will be seen as a hero and receive great rewards and respect for his gruesome deed.

And so Souad made the horrendous mistake in her culture to be born a female. Females are seen as being equivalent to dirt. They are less worthy than cows and sheep -- a fact that Souad’s father drilled into his daughters’ heads throughout their lives.

In the Arab Middle East, baby girls are simply not wanted -- and, as Souad recalls, “Every birth of a girl was like a burial in the family.” The mother is always blamed for bringing a non-child (a girl) into the world -- even though we all know that it’s the father that determines the child’s gender.

In any case, baby girls are often just killed and disposed of in many parts of the Arab world. That is why Souad recalls her mother suffocating nine of her own baby daughters, twice right in front of her eyes.

If you are a baby girl and are exonerated from death, you will confront vicious violence. The abusive and neglectful care of baby girls is rampant throughout the Arab Middle East. Purposeful injury to them is all too common, including burns and the injection of kerosene and medicines to the point of poisoning and death.

Hospital records report frequent brain damage of newborn girls due to "accidents." The practice of inserting pins and needles into baby girls’ abdomen and chest, and even into the fontanel, is extensive. Many female children have been killed in this way. Some girls survive and years later, even in old age, they discover that needles and pins are in their brains. Hospital admissions for girls suffering from malnutrition is also a cultural norm.

It goes without saying that the death rate for Arab girls is significantly higher than for boys.

Souad was not suffocated upon birth. She lived. But she was reminded she was a female everyday -- by enslavement, confinement and constant beatings. Never allowed to go anywhere, she knew nothing about the outside world -- except that the Jews were evil and that she was not to go near them. They were halouf, pigs. And this was no fable spread by some tribal leader. No, it was an irrefutable truth taught in the Qur’an itself. Indeed, Allah was so disgusted with Jews that he transformed them into apes and pigs. (Suras 5:60/65, 2:65 and 7:166).

In her memoir, Souad relates that for a day to go by without a beating was unusual for her and her sisters. She also often had her hair shaved off and was tied to a stable gate.

In the end, Souad compounded her transgression of being a girl by committing a bigger crime: falling in love. A young man seduced and impregnated her, knowing full well that he had delivered her a death sentence. Her family subsequently planned out her murder and her brother-in-law was assigned the heroic task.

“I’m going to take care of you,” were the brother-in law’s soothing words before he doused Souad with gasoline and set her aflame.

Ninety percent of Souad’s body was burned and she was left to die in a local hospital – where the staff refused to treat her, for they understood all too well that it was important for this charmuta to die. Souad’s mother showed up to the hospital as the protagonist in the final act, hoping to finish off what her son-in-law had started. In her unrivalled motherly love, she brought a glass of poison to her daughter’s lips, commanding her to drink. But the entrance of a doctor into the hospital room interfered with the intended script and Souad’s life was spared.

By the miraculous and courageous intervention of a Swiss-based humanitarian worker (“Jacqueline”), Souad survived and was flown to Europe -- where she lives today under a secret identity. If her family discovered that she were alive and discerned her new whereabouts, they would still come to murder to her.

Souad’s life story is a reminder to all of us of the terrible suffering of women in the Arab and Islamic world. Her nightmarish ordeal is a norm in that universe, where women of all ages are brutalized and bestialized into non-existence.

The root cause of this dark phenomenon does not lie in numerous men sitting around improvising ways to hurt women. The entire life-negating process is legitimized and institutionalized by Arab tribal culture and Islamic fundamentalism, which blur into each other and together perpetuate the repression, control and negation of female freedom.

Arab tribal culture and militant Islam are both founded on the dehumanization of females. Their social structures are desperately -- and ferociously -- dependent on it. To allow a woman equality and personal free choice necessarily means the disintegration of their social orders. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Arabic word fitna has two interchangeable meanings: a beautiful woman and social chaos.

And so the War on Terror can have no better crystallization: one side allows the veneration of human beauty and its freedom, and accepts all the chance and risk that comes with it; the other lusts for the incineration of every ingredient of human desire, yearning for a sterilized and disinfected utopia where humans will be purged of what and who they are.

Thus, a sobering reality stares us in the face: Souad’s soul-tearing journey does not exist in a vacuum. It is a chilling and powerful reminder to us of the essence of the War on Terror.

Islamic fundamentalists know -- all too well -- that the only way their cultures will survive is for one half of the human race to remain caged and enslaved. But the West stands in stark opposition to that pathological and death-seeking quest. And the West’s values continue to spread with lightning speed. In the age of globalization, mass communication and the Internet, the reality of Western women’s free choice and control over their own identity -- and sexuality – is a force that cannot be stopped.

And so, like a possessed individual who has holy water sprinkled on him in an exorcism, radical Islam shrieks and foams at the mouth in our modern world, tormented and enraged by the sprinkles of liberty that touch it -- and that it cannot withstand. Increasingly cornered by the nightmare of free and happy females, Islamism must lash out in rage and violence in its effort to preserve its tyranny over human life.

We begin to understand, therefore, why Souad was a mandatory victim in a demented and psychopathic culture that, in its lust for death, must necessarily despise the gender that fertilizes and bestows life. And we also begin to understand why the entity that has liberated its own Souads -- and threatens to liberate all the Souads of the world – must also, like Souad, be annihilated. And make no mistake: those forces who seek to suffocate love -- as Souad’s mother suffocated her nine baby daughters – know exactly who and what they need to extinguish.

And so we are at war.

And this war is predominantly about women -- about who they are, where they belong and whether they are entitled to dignity, autonomy, liberty and respect.

Souad was doused with gasoline and set afire because she fell in love.

Because she yearned to be free.

And there is hope, for there are wonderful movements, like the Swiss foundation SURGIR, that works with women everywhere in the world who are subject to criminal traditions.[2]

And hope also resides in us taking an extra step.

That extra step is pooling together all of our voices, so that we can collectively affirm, with courage and forthrightness, that, unequivocally, We Are All Souad.

Because we stand with Souad.

And the fate of an abused woman is humanity’s fate. And when women, our mothers, are violated, then life is violated, and every single one of us is violated.

The honor killer who sets a woman on fire operates out of the same impulse that motivated Mohammad Atta to give his life so that, on September 11, 2003, 3,000 American citizens would perish in flames -- like Souad was supposed to.

And so let us turn to life, rather than death, and extend our hand to Souad – and to every other Souad. And to every potential Souad.

And then at least the cards will be on the table. And we’ll be honest in why we need to fight this war – and to win this war.

Because in so doing we will not only save our mothers.

We will save ourselves.

NOTES:

[1] Souad, Burned Alive: A Victim of the Law of Men (New York: Warner Books, 2003), p.106.

[2] SURGIR is a movement which individually targets the defense and rescue of girls and women subjected to criminal traditions. Visit their website at www.surgir.ch/en/nous.html_________________Referendum AFTER Regime Change

"I'm ready to die for you to be able to say your own opinions, even if i strongly disagree with you" (Voltaire)

Feel free to email her and thank her for bringing these hideous crimes to the attention of the world.

And imagine, according to Noble Peace Prize winning Ayatollah Ebadi the stituation involving women in Iran is improving legally

I guess this would be an example of the legal improvements that Ayatollah Ebadi has spoken of:

Quote:

Women report that in order to have a judge approve a divorce they have to have sex with him. Women who are arrested for prostitution say they must have sex with the arresting officer. There are reports of police locating young women for sex for the wealthy and powerful mullahs.

In cities, shelters have been set up to provide assistance for runaways. Officials who run these shelters are often corrupt; they run prostitution rings using the girls from the shelter. For example in Karaj, the former head of a Revolutionary Tribunal and seven other senior officials were arrested in connection with a prostitution ring that used 12- to 18-year-old girls from a shelter called the Center of Islamic Orientation.

Other instances of corruption abound. There was a judge in Karaj who was involved in a network that identified young girls to be sold abroad. And in Qom, the center for religious training in Iran, when a prostitution ring was broken up, some of the people arrested were from government agencies, including the Department of Justice.

dam the arab culture ...i think they are the reason we have the word violence in english...they are honestly savage....the most are the saudi arabians because of their pure arabness...._________________iran iranam iraaanam
ke az to daram in jaanam
janam fadayat
mikhanam
payande baadi IRANam!!!!!!!

Can you do me a favor and kiss the ground when you exit the plane?
Kiss that sacred land of ours, IranZamin, for all of us that are not able to make this journey, i'm sure that everyone witnessing you doing this will understand your feelings when you perform this act, AND while you do it cry out: Payandeh Iran!
I would really appreciate it if you could do that for me, for yourself, for all of us...

actually as i have said before im going to iran with my quran and farsi translation and theres underground submitter meetings there...im just hoping to not get caught by the anti religion government there...as they hate my religion_________________iran iranam iraaanam
ke az to daram in jaanam
janam fadayat
mikhanam
payande baadi IRANam!!!!!!!

I am honored to have the opportunity to take part in this public forum to help
shed light on the complex and sensitive issue of child marriage -- an issue for
which the very definition is still under debate. For that reason, I will use
the terms "early marriage" as well as "forced marriage" in my remarks. I hope
that together we can identify concrete steps the international community might
take to reduce the prevalence of this devastating practice, which deprives
women and young girls of their dignity and human rights.

I want to commend Cherreka Montgomery of the International Center for Research
on Women (ICRW) for spearheading this forum, and for her passion and admirable
dedication to the issue.

I am pleased to join this distinguished group of women leaders on the panel who
bring a wealth of expertise to help us analyze the myriad angles of this human
rights and development challenge.

I welcome Karin Landgren, Chief of Child Protection from UNICEF; Winifred
Mwebesa, Family Planning and Reproductive Health Advisor from Save the
Children; and Geeta Rao Gupta President, International Center for Research on
Women.

I am looking forward to having an open, frank, and fruitful discussion. I am
especially pleased that we will also be hearing from Kakenya Ntaiya, a
remarkable young woman from Kenya who has a very inspiring personal story to
share. Her story is a story of hope and success.

As the Senior Coordinator of International Women's Issues here the State
Department, my Office is called to work on a broad range of issues that affect
women's human rights. Our mission is to ensure that women's concerns are
integrated into all key pillars of U.S. foreign policy and to promote global
respect for women.

Because early marriage poses grave risks not only to women's basis rights but
also their health, economic independence, education, and status in society, we
cannot remain silent.

This practice is especially troubling in that it treats young girls as
property, deprives them of having a voice in determining their own future, and
brings their childhood to a premature end. In many cases the practice is
inseparable from the cycle of violence and abuse against women. Most tragic,
perhaps, are instances of poor families forced to sell their daughters out of
economic survival.

It is unconscionable that in the 21st century girls as young as 7 or 8 can be
sold as brides. There is no denying that extreme poverty is the driving factor
that has enabled the practice to continue, even in countries where it has been
outlawed.

Linking the Fight to Prevent Early Marriage to U.S. Policy

The United States, as a defender of liberty and human rights is firmly
committed to defending the vulnerable. U.S. First Lady Laura Bush has
recognized the connection between poverty, health, and education and has
stated: "Studies throughout the world show that women's health and the
opportunities they have in life are directly related to the strength of a
country's economy and the level of education attained by its children." That is
precisely why U.S. policies and programs to advance the status of women are
specifically geared to replacing despair and poverty with hope and opportunity.

I would like to say a few words about the impact of early marriage and forced
marriage in Afghanistan, a priority country for my office. Though Afghan women
have been making tremendous strides since the fall of the Taliban, child
marriage persists. Afghanistan has among the world's highest rate of maternal
and infant mortality; early marriage is likely both a cause and a symptom of
this problem.

According to the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, between 60%
and 80 % of marriages in Afghanistan are forced marriages which give women no
right to refuse. Many of those marriages, especially in the rural areas,
involve girls below the age of 15. (And the UN Population Fund has reported
that that in some rural areas of Afghanistan, children as young as six years
old are married off by their families.)

I met recently with Afghan Minister of Health Fatimie who is a true champion
for women. He called attention to issue of child marriage at several speaking
events in Washington this month. He stressed that poverty is the cause of
numerous problems facing Afghanistan, and is the driving factor that leads
parents to sell their underage daughters as brides. He reiterated that health
and education are key to tackling the underlying causes that perpetuate the
acceptance of this practice.

State Department Response

To help understand and clarify the nature and scope of the early marriage
problem around the globe, and in response to increased Congressional interest
in this topic, the State Department recently conducted a survey with our
embassies overseas to collect critical information about the legal age of
marriage, the extent of underage marriage, and any efforts to combat child
marriage in affected countries.

Sixty-four countries out of 182 polled reported child marriage to be of
concern, the majority of which were found in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in
parts of the Middle East and South Asia. However, a majority of posts surveyed
pointed to the lack of reliable, official data as a major obstacle for
assessing the extent of the practice of early marriage in the countries
represented.

I would just like to share some key observations we collected:

* In most regions, posts indicated that child marriage is more likely to
occur in rural areas and that in general "poverty, lack of education, and
unemployment are the root causes of social ills associated with early
marriage."
* The practice puts girls at greater risk of pregnancy and childbirth before
they have reached physical maturity, a circumstance that often produces
serious physical trauma, psychological disturbance, even domestic abuse and
violence, and sometimes lifelong physical and/or emotional incapacities.
* Some African posts cited additional health concerns, including the
transmission of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases from older
males to young females, and fistula. Women or girls who suffer from fistula
are often stigmatized by the community and abandoned by their husbands. And
they are less likely to seek medical attention.
* In addition, the practice of polygamy further compounds the obvious health
risks that disproportionately affect young women and girls.
* They also identified a lack of knowledge, information, and access to
services, education and economic opportunities as factors contributing to
the incidences of early marriage.

While we can monitor and report on the instances of child marriage in
developing countries, the response -- which must be an integrated approach --
is a greater challenge. But we can see that with the successes of some of our
programs in Afghanistan and in other post-conflict and developing countries
that we can have helped to open up opportunities for women. In Afghanistan we
have trained women leaders, journalists who themselves have brought attention
to issues facing women, and entrepreneurs who are building new lives for
themselves and their families.

While we continue to follow all developments on this issue it becomes clear
that our approach is the right one: we must continue to place emphasis on
education, increasing access to adequate healthcare, and strengthening economic
opportunities for women to give girls and their families hope and resources to
choose an alternative path. Educating men must also be part of any sustainable
strategy.

There are myriad ways to harness the programs underway or already deployed to
have a multiplier effect. The State Department and USAID have already had
demonstrable success through a number of our programs on the community level in
a number of countries, but we need to build on this success to reduce and
eliminate incidences of child marriage.

Another new opportunity is President Bush's Initiative for Africa. Women's
Justice and Empowerment in Africa presents another opportunity, and a new angle
to target the problem. The President announced a $55 million initiative to
support women's justice and empowerment in Africa, with a focus on combating
violence and abuse against women. Empowering women economically and enforcing
the rule of law is another part of the toolkit to strengthen the rights and
dignity of women and girls.

Conclusion

The United States is committed to creating opportunities and capacity-building
through programs and initiatives that give women the knowledge, skills, and
resources to take charge of their own lives. Girls can be direct beneficiaries
of these programs.

This reminds me of something Secretary Rice herself has said, "we have to deal
with the world as it is, but we don't have to accept the world as it is." She
has challenged us to stretch the limits to make the world freer and more
prosperous for all humanity, in other words "to enlarge the realm of the
possible."

We need to be shining the spotlight on the problem of early marriage and its
underlying causes. In this way we can bring hope to those trapped in the cycle
of poverty, a reality that leaves young girls vulnerable to forced marriage
before they have had the opportunity to experience childhood. Despite the many
challenges that we are talking about today, we should recognize that
increasingly women are not just victims, they are agents of change. We must
continue to do everything we can to ensure that girls have every opportunity to
become agents of change and to expand the "realm of what is possible" for their
societies and the world at large.

Released on September 14, 2005

************************************************************
See http://www.state.gov for Senior State Department
Official's statements and testimonies
************************************************************

Tragically I don't think Arab Women have anything against their Barbarian Culture. I think Arab Women are for the most part content to be powerless Quran Quoting racists.

Just the other day I talked to a woman from Saudi Arabia, who told me that Israel is a perfect example of awful treatment of women.

I asked her if there even is an Arab Woman of any time to compare to Golda Mier, and guess what her response was.

She told me that Golda Mier being elected was an example of an atrocity for women are not suppose to command because God made them inferior, and that it is awful for men to empower them too much and doom them to hell.

Arab Feminists are rarer then Japanese Assyrians, there are groups that call themselves things like "Arab Women for human rights" "Palestinian Feminist Association", but their agendas tend to be spreading anti-semitic, and anti-Israeli propaganda, not the emancipation of women.

The treatment of Persian Women needs to be improved by the overthrow of the Islamists.

The treatment of Arab Women can not change untill Arab Women want it to change.

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse.

One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.

That is why it is folly to approach Iran as a prospective negotiating partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical government security guarantees, for the threat to its security arises from within. Once a people has determined to extinguish itself, nothing will prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to the demographic data, which come from the demographers of the United Nations. But it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth is a giant magnet; it must attract either the largest national minority in Iran, or the military attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a long-delayed justice for that ancient and resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to throw off the Persian yoke.

The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25:
Prostitution is on the rise in Iran ... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told ADNKronos International (AKI) that he believes Iran's deteriorating economy and the high unemployment rate among youths to be the main causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on Iran's streets. Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in Iran".
The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day.

These numbers cannot be verified, to be sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests that the actual numbers must be very large indeed, so large, in fact, as to help explain the frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline. Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.

Islamism (or what George W Bush has called "Islamo-fascism") responds to the crisis of faith. As I wrote on November 8, 2005:
The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. [3]
Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

My answer to his wrong thinking-ness is that raising a family, growing old and watching your kids thrive and prosper in peace, and knowing the joy of this over time, having contributed to its manifestation , having created one's reality , a new generation, ....is the ultimate artistic endeavor.

La Familia, Solidarity, .....no question a man (or woman) would give their life to save one's family, but that would not be art, rather shear and tragic neccessity in extreme circumstance.

Antar is putting a cause above family to the extent that it appears that the leadership of a nation advocates national suicide on an artistic basis, for meglomaniacal ends, and he should be given a one way ticket to a padded cell in hell....the Islamic version of hell that is.....at the hands of the global umma itself.

This is the bit that really convinces me Antar is a taco shy of a combination plate....Islam is already global....What exactly is the guy's malfunction?....unless of course he is advocating a global purge of all non-Muslim people, then that is public advocation of Genocide on a global scale and will not be permitted to occur. The incitement , inducement, rational, however you wish to characterize Antar's advocacy of Martyrdom in the context of this video... is in and of itself, evidence of, and grounds for inditement on charges of intent to commit mass murder, in an international court of law.

Those of the Muslim faith, as well as those Iranians who read this have my great sympathy and support for the choice that you must now make in favor of freedom....as individuals, to preserve your families, nation and the umma itself from those who lead a great nation and people over oblivion\'s cliff.